Cairn

Richie McCaffery's debut collection of poems, Cairn, begins with a dedication and ends with ghosts in between lie artefacts and antiquities: a police whistle, a tarnished silver spoon, a bookmark lodged in an old book. Soaring and melancholy, the poems form signposts in the landscape of life, lore and family, mementoes for the buried and the living. Cairn is an understated and quietly-brilliant collection of poems, where each word is tactile and polished like a beach-combed pebble; these are poems you ll want to pocket and treasure.